Johannes Cabal the Necromancer

CHAPTER 2 in which Cabal practices his map-reading and meets an old acquaintance

The Flatlands rolled as far as the eye could see in any direction — remarkably flat, remarkably boring, and not nearly high enough above sea level for comfort. The fields all looked like marshes waiting to happen; in some cases, the wait was over. Dilapidated wooden fences made a poor job of delineating one unhealthy-looking patch of land from the next. Stone walls didn’t last here; they sank. In three directions it was hard to see where the grey land merged into the grey sky. In the fourth, a long earthwork ran until it faded into the distance.

A dreary, depressing place, and Cabal was very surprised suddenly to be in the middle of it. He spent an undignified few moments trying to get over the fact that he was no longer in Hell, wheeling on the spot like somebody who has walked into the wrong toilets. When he finally deduced that he had been unceremoniously translocated, he marked the revelation with a filthy curse in a language that had been dead eight thousand years, so managing to be amazingly erudite and amazingly uncouth in the selfsame instant.

Cabal put down his gladstone bag, beat the last few whiffs of sulphurous smoke out of his clothes with his hat, and opened the file. Several sheets down, he found a map of the area that he withdrew before reclosing the file. He took a moment to orientate himself. Without a compass or a visible sun to work with, a map of the Flatlands tended to be like one of those pictures which look like something completely different when you turn them upside down. In this case, it looked really rather similar no matter which way you turned it.

He found a few lanes that ran straight until it seemed that whoever built them had realised there was no point in pretending that anyone was ever going to travel them. These lanes had been hastily finished with odd little curlicues, as if that had been the intention all along. Only the earthwork stood out in that tedious landscape, but, unfortunately, it didn’t seem to be on the map. Finally, after some exasperated and faintly histrionic sighing, Cabal noticed a faint dotted line on the map labelled “Route of proposed spur line.” The red cross that he assumed was his destination lay on the line, but the line had been so slight, he simply hadn’t seen it.

That must be it, he concluded. It was an old map, and the spur line had been built. The earthwork was a raised railway bed. Simple. Pleased with his deduction, he turned to pick up his bag and found that he was no longer alone.

The two men whom he’d caught in a pantomime of stealth were of a disreputable appearance. There was a sense that if you opened an illustrated dictionary and looked up “disreputable” there would be a picture of one or the other of them. Possibly both. After all, if there was some minor detail of reprehensible untrustworthiness that couldn’t be found in one of them, it was certain to be present in his partner. One was short and greasy. The other was taller, and looked like his mother had been scared — scared quite badly — by a scabby vulture. They grinned, and Cabal almost sighed with the pathetic predictability of it all. Oh well. Best to get it over with.

“Can I help you gentlemen?” he said with no hint of irony.

“Oh, he called us ‘gennlemen,’ Dennis, didja ’ear ’im?” said the short one.

“Hur-hur. ‘Gennlemen.’ Hur,” answered the tall one, Dennis, who seemed to be the straight man.

“Tha’s very perlite, innit? Very perlite indeed. Ho, yus. Spoke jus’ like a gennleman.”

“‘Gennleman,’ hur-hur. Yus, Denzil. Verr perlite.” Dennis nodded and showed the poor state of his dentition.

Cabal was getting irritated. He was on a tight schedule and just wished they’d hurry up and mug him.

“Werl,” said Denzil, the brains of the operation, “we wus wondering if you’d paid the toll, see?”

“Of course,” said Cabal, who spoke Bare-Faced Liar like a native when the situation called for it. “I paid at the toll gate.”

Dennis and Denzil looked nonplussed. They’d spent weeks practising this criminal act; diagrams on blackboards, little dioramas with figures representing them and their potential victim — a tin Sioux Indian, a small bear with a pair of cymbals, and a llama respectively. Somehow this particular eventuality had never been covered.

“There b’aint be no toll gate,” muttered Denzil.

“No? Then there can’t be any toll,” said Cabal with an easy irrationality that ran against the grain of his brutally rational mind. He knew he’d regret it in the morning, but he just wanted to get this whole situation over and done with as quickly as possible.

Dennis was shaking his head slowly as he ran through the contingency plans. They’d never made any, so it didn’t take very long. They had considered making some, but, then, they’d also considered getting drunk at the same time. If they had ever actually come up with a contingency plan — and there is no evidence that they did — they had forgotten it again somewhere around the tenth pint. It had been no great loss: they had never needed a Plan B before. Indeed, they had never needed a Plan A before, dependent as it was upon actually finding somebody to rob amongst the dreary and seldom-travelled lanes of the Flatlands. With the unexpected discovery of an actual viable victim, the gaping holes in the scheme were quickly becoming apparent.

Dennis shook his head again, but when his cognitive process halfheartedly kicked in, the sensation of thinking was like worms in a jam jar, and he wished it would stop. Meanwhile, the incisive wit of Denzil had come to the rescue.

“I don’t care if there b’aint be no toll. We’re robbin’ you anyway.” He drew a short, rusty blade and elbowed Dennis until he drew his. Now they were on solid ground. They’d killed before and, by some miracle, had got away with it. If this thin streak of piss didn’t stump up the cash right this minute, they’d be taking their chances with the gallows again, and the devil could take the consequences. Cabal shrugged.

“I don’t have any money,” he said truthfully.

Denzil pointed at the bag. “What’s in there, then?”

There comes a time when the thin skein of possibilities that suspends us above the unknown stretches and tears in places. For Dennis and Denzil, that moment was now. The skein grew thinner and more transparent as Cabal reached down and picked up his bag.

“Nothing that you could want. I’m a scientist. This contains my equipment.”

“A scientiss?” moaned Dennis. He put his hand on Denzil’s shoulder. “He woan have no money. C’mon, Denzil. Less go.”

The skein thickened and started to knit itself back. Denzil, however, had decided that he really didn’t like Cabal. Even if Cabal had nothing that they wanted, Denzil was damn sure that he was going to take it anyway. He angrily shook Dennis’s hand from his shoulder.

“No, I want whatever you’ve got, you milk-faced bugger. Open the bloody bag before I cut ya.” The skein grew thin as a bubble, tight as a drumskin. Cabal pursed his lips and opened the bag. The skein tore from side to side. Although Dennis and Denzil hadn’t been fully acquainted with the facts yet, they were doomed men.

Cabal reached in and drew out a human skull. Denzil and Dennis took a step back. Cabal wondered for a moment how he was going to explain concisely why he was carrying a bank clerk’s skull and decided not to.

“This is a memento mori,” he said instead. He could see they were going to say it — no, it was a skull — so he quickly added, “A reminder of mortality. That we are all clay. That we all die.” This last was said pointedly, but the pair of thieves was too busy gawping at the skull to be paying much attention to the nuances. He replaced the skull and took out a small leather folder. He flipped it open to reveal gleaming scalpels and probes. “These are my surgical instruments.”

“Yer a doctor, then?” asked Denzil, trying to guess how much the instruments might be worth. Cabal put them away again.

“Not really. These,” he continued as he produced a box about the size of a binocular case, padded inside and out, “are phials containing Test Batch 247.” He worked the catch with his thumb and opened it to show the heads of several test tubes, each sealed with wax into which the imaginative might have thought they saw a curious symbol worked.

Denzil could see that they weren’t going to be retiring after this job. “Wassat worth, then?”

Cabal closed the case and put it away. “If you don’t know how to use them, nothing at all. And finally,” he said, rummaging deep in the glad-stone. “This is a Webley.577.” Cabal drew the biggest handgun either Denzil or Dennis had ever seen in his life. Dennis cheered up.

“Werl, that’s gotta be worth something, eh? Eh, Denzil?” He turned around to see Denzil running as fast as his fat little legs could carry him. Somewhere deep in the reptilian part of his brain, Dennis got the feeling that he might be in trouble. The bullet that smashed through his back did nothing to diminish this. Even as Dennis was falling, his minimal amounts of brain activity flickering down to nothing, Cabal was carefully levelling the revolver at Denzil’s diminishing form. The first shot threw up stone fragments close by his heels. Cabal raised his aim a little and tried again. Denzil went down like he’d been poleaxed.

It took some time to find a spot where he could climb through the straggling and unhealthy hedgerow that grew alongside the earthwork, and another few minutes of climbing through brambles to reach the top. As he’d surmised, this was indeed the “proposed spur line” mentioned on the map. The dilapidated state of the line made him wonder how old the map was: the rails were heavy with undisturbed rust, the sleepers were rotting under moulds and mushrooms, weeds and young trees grew waist-high along the full length of the track as far as he could see. He consulted the map again. From his vantage point he could finally make out a few of what might, locally at least, be called landmarks: ponds, marshes, and forks in the roads. He turned the map through a few angles until he could work out where he was, reorientated himself facing north, and then looked directly along the line where the map carried an enigmatic “X.” The vegetation seemed far more mature there, a dense copse of trees that straddled the line and spread down each embankment. That, he hoped, must be it.

He set off towards the trees with determination, but after a few steps he was halted by the sound of something falling heavily on the track behind him. He turned and snapped, “Do keep up! We don’t have all day.” Denzil blinked slowly at him and then down at Dennis, who was trying to get up, but his foot had caught under a rotten sleeper. It took a moment for Denzil to realise that he might help by kicking Dennis’s heel repeatedly until it came loose. He took slow, careful aim, swung his leg with great force, missed, and ended up on his back. He blinked uncomprehendingly at the grey sky. It seemed much more difficult to get things done now that he was dead.

Cabal pulled a little black book from his pocket, drew a pencil from its spine, and made a note. Batch 247 seemed to act quickly, but it certainly didn’t help co-ordination in any practical sense. With hindsight, perhaps he should have made some effort to take their souls on a more formal basis as the first donors of the hundred. That he hadn’t was partially down to not being quite sure how one actually sets about taking souls on a more formal basis, but mainly because they had peeved him. “I’ll be over there.” He pointed towards the trees and put his notebook away. “Catch up when you’re able.” That, he thought ruefully, might be some time.

As Cabal got closer to the trees, he began to see how long the copse was — perhaps a quarter of a mile. Given the stunted state of everything else in sight, that was suspicious in itself. Nothing else seemed likely to produce much more than toothpicks, while these trees were great twisted brutes that stood on the landscape as if painted in black ink. Leafless branches clutched at the sky, and the convulsed bark of the trunks looked, to a fanciful mind, like human faces twisted in torment. “This,” he said quietly, “must be the place. It’s so melodramatic.”

In a nearby tree that might have been an elm before being regularly watered with LSD, a carrion crow sat and regarded Cabal keenly. It tilted its head and cawed mockingly at Cabal. Then it saw Dennis and Denzil stumbling along the track a hundred yards behind him and, full of hope and appetite, flew to investigate them.

Cabal passed the tortured elm, stepped over the roots of a lunatic’s vision of a witch hazel, and came face to face with the Monster.

Cabal exhaled sharply, and his always pale complexion turned an ugly grey for a second, until he brought himself under control. He didn’t move, tried not to breathe, tried not to let the great black Monster know he was alive. Then he took a deep, shuddering breath, stepped forward, and placed his hand upon its face.

He had to step on the cowcatcher to reach, though.

It was the most astounding piece of engineering he thought he’d ever seen, and he’d seen a few. A massive locomotive that even here, dead and neglected, its firebox long cold, demanded and received unthinking respect. It bore some affectations of the Old West — the cowcatcher, the fluted smokestack — but the body seemed more Old World, aggressively squared and not afraid to shunt every carriage ever built from here to Hell. Perhaps it was capable of that. Cabal nodded approvingly: he might not be an engineer by trade, but he knew solid workmanship when he saw it.

Apparently, so did all nearby creatures. Despite any number of tempting perches for local incontinent birds, the only dirt on it was the coating of curious black rust that came off on his fingers like very coarse soot. Cabal sniffed at it cautiously and was instantly put in mind of energetic evenings down in the cellar, sawing up the evidence and putting it in the furnace before the police arrived. He pushed his tinted spectacles up his nose and blinked thoughtfully behind them. What exactly did this thing run on? He hoped it was wood or coal; it would be much more convenient.

A commotion made him turn. The crow had settled on Denzil’s head and was trying to get a meal out of him. Specifically, out of his eye socket. The hapless dead man had his head down and his arms outstretched and was running a clumsy circle in an effort to dislodge the bird. It wasn’t working; the crow seemed to have stapled itself in place. Dennis wasn’t helping things by trying to hit the bird with a sickly sapling he’d torn up. Blows rained down on Denzil’s back, not even remotely close to the target, and soil from the roots flew everywhere.

“Stop that!” barked Cabal. Both walking dead and bird stopped that. Dennis tried to hide the tree behind his back. “You there. Crow. Come here.” With utmost reluctance, the crow launched itself from Denzil, swooped low until it was almost touching the ground, then swept back up to head height, slalomed nonchalantly through the intervening trees, and landed on Cabal’s shoulder. Cabal turned on his heel and started to walk down past the huge locomotive and towards the train of carriages and cars linked up behind it. “You’ll be fed shortly, bird, so no further trouble, yes?” The crow blinked. “Oh, by the by, if you ever shit on my shoulder, you’ll be in a taxidermist’s window so fast as to beggar belief. Understood?”

“Kronk,” said the crow, which may have meant, “Yes, master.” It could equally well have meant, “You’ll have to catch me first, bugger-lugs.” Either way, it kept its sphincters tight.

Cabal walked slowly along the train. There were a few carriages, several flatcars stacked with once brightly painted boards, and, towards the back, a good number of sealed boxcars. He arrived at the first of them and stopped by the large sliding door that ran for a quarter of its length. He was just considering how to get in when it slid open of its own accord with a hideous shrieking of rusty metal. “Oh,” said Cabal, unimpressed. “It’s you.”

The Little Old Man finished dogging the door open and looked down. “Aye, it’s me, young Cabal. You’ve taken your time.”

Cabal placed a foot on a metal rung, gripped the rail by the door edge, and pulled himself up. The crow flapped off his shoulder and landed on a nearby stanchion. It settled down to practise looking at things beadily.

“You’re lucky I’m here at all. The map was next to useless,” Cabal said as he brushed rust off his hands and shoulder where the doorframe had touched him. He looked at the man. “I was hoping Satan might send something else rather than you, you contrary old bastard.”

The man laughed. Actually, he cackled.

“Oh, we go way back, Johannes. His Worshipfulness thought you might like a familiar face.”

Cabal was looking around the gloomy car. “Only if I thought blowing a hole in it would make any difference,” he replied offhandedly.

The Little Old Man was not, in any real sense, little or a man. He was certainly, however, very old. He was an embodiment of an archetype: the old codger with the flat cap and the grey beard. He cackled, he rolled his own foul-smelling cigarettes, and, when on form, he could be relied on to dribble. He was exactly the sort of person that makes youth fashionable. He was also one of Satan’s numerous avatars: fragments of his personalities and random thoughts that had taken form in the mortal realm. They allowed him to maintain a steady background hum of elemental evil in the world while he concentrated on more important things down in Hell. His cribbage game, for example. Until recent events, the Little Old Man had been Cabal’s only contact with Satan. This was the entity that he’d sold his soul to years before, and the entity that had invalidated more lines of research with his wilful interference than Cabal cared to remember.

The Little Old Man sat on a crate and watched Cabal investigate the dark corners. “Oh, Johannes. I’m hurt,” he said cheerfully. “After all we’ve been through.”

Cabal, his cursory examination of the boxcar completed, walked back to him. “‘All we’ve been through’? All you’ve put me through, surely? If you hadn’t bought my soul and then been such a pervasive nuisance ever since, none of this” — he made a gesture that encompassed the whole train — “would have been necessary.”

The Little Old Man shrugged. “I was only doing my job. You can’t expect altruism from one of Satan’s little helpers.”

Cabal sighed. “Look, I’d really like to be able to say that I’m delighted that you could make it and it’s a real tonic to see you, but I’d be lying.”

“I know.”

“So do you think we might cut along with a little more alacrity, all the quicker to get you out of my sight? I am, after all, on a rather tight schedule.”

“Schedule,” said the Little Old Man, holding up a finger. “I’m glad you reminded me. You’ll be needing this.” He reached into his grubby old coat and produced an hourglass a little over a foot in height. Instead of sand, however, it seemed to be filled with an incredibly fine powder. Tiny motes made their way from the upper chamber into the narrow neck and cascaded downwards. Despite the steady stream, the floor of the bottom chamber barely had a dusting upon it. “This shows you how much time you’ve got left. You know how one works, don’t you?” Cabal gave him a look. “’course you do, clever lad like you. Anyway, when all the grains have fallen from top to bottom, time’s up. Simple. Oh, one thing to remember. This isn’t the actual glass that my better part has down in the hot place. It’s a sort of repeater, relay thing. You can do what you like to this one but it doesn’t affect the time you’ve got left. See?” He turned the glass. The motes fell upwards regardless. The Little Old Man held it at different angles, but nothing made any difference. Time was still passing, and the grains carried on falling in a steady, gravity-boggling stream. “Neat, eh? Goes down a bomb at parties, I can tell you.”

“Really?” said Cabal as he took the glass. “I’ll have to hold a soirée just to impress my friends.”

“You haven’t got any friends.”

“I’m not holding a soirée, either. You have a problem with sarcasm, don’t you? Now, do you have anything else fascinating to impart or can I kick your wrinkly little carcass down the embankment, as I so dearly wish?”

The Little Old Man huffed. “You’re not nice.”

“Your” — Cabal searched for the right word — “founder has given me the task of sending one hundred souls to eternal torment. To be quite frank, I don’t think my name is ever going to become a byword for popularity.”

“You’re right there.” The Little Old Man searched inside his capaciously shapeless coat and finally found a thin file box as broad and wide as foolscap by an inch deep. He undid the thin black tape ribbon sealing it, took off the lid, and showed the contents to Cabal. It was a pack of forms printed on some sort of faintly yellow parchment. Cabal leaned forward and read the top line.

“‘Voluntary Damnation Form. To be filled in by the damnee. EAGH/I.’” He straightened up. “I see the hand of Arthur Trubshaw at work here.”

“You’re not wrong,” replied the Little Old Man as he tied the package up again. “One hundred forms to be handed in fully completed in a little less than a year’s time. Feeling up to it, Johannes?” He passed over the box. Cabal hefted it and looked around.

“I’m not sure. I accepted this challenge on the understanding that I would have the Carnival of Discord on my side. As yet, all I seem to have been given is a rolling junk shop. Tell Satan — no carnival, no deal.”

“No carnival? No carnival? This is it! Wagons roll! The Greatest Show on Earth! Use your imagination, why don’t you?”

“Imagination? I’d have to be hallucinating before I could believe this shambles was the Greatest Show on Earth.”

The Little Old Man got up from the crate and walked over to the back wall, shaking his head and muttering about young folk today. Leaning against the wall was a stack of broad wooden boards half covered by a tarpaulin. This he whipped off in possibly the weakest theatrical flourish Cabal had ever seen, to reveal that the boards were signs — battered and peeling, but signs nonetheless.

“Here you go. Here are your sideshows. ‘See! From the Mysterious East! The Enigmatic Cleopatra! Three Thousand Years in the Tomb Yet Still the Most Beautiful Woman in the World!’ Good, eh? What’s this one? ‘Marvel at the Bat-Faced Boy! Direct from the Darkest Jungle!’ Woooooh! Scary stuff, isn’t it?”

“The sheer preponderance of exclamation marks is terrifying in itself.”

“That’s just traditional. ‘Gasp! At the Log-Headed Girl!’ That can’t be right.” He probed at the flaking paint. “Surely it should say ‘ Dog-Headed Girl’? Oooh, no. It does say ‘ Log-Headed.’ That’ll pull the crowds.” He nodded confidently at Cabal.

Cabal had lost patience with the Little Old Man’s drivel. He stood by the open door watching Dennis and Denzil’s painfully slow progress along the trackside with the mildest interest possible.

“Oh, yes,” he said over his shoulder. “They’ll come from miles around for this. ‘Roll up, roll up. See the world’s largest collection of antediluvian signage. Gasp at the decrepitude. Be astounded by the grammar. A fascinating show rivalled only by the lint in your navel.’ I’ll have to fight them off with a stick.”

The Little Old Man narrowed his eyes and thought carefully.

“That’s sarcasm, isn’t it?”

Cabal looked out at the Flatlands again. He really didn’t care anymore. This whole thing was another of Satan’s dim-witted jokes. He had no idea why he bothered.

“Yes,” he replied. “That’s sarcasm.” He turned and walked over to the stack of signs. “This is a pointless enterprise without personnel. I don’t have any.”

A sound made them turn to the door. Dennis had reached it and was just contemplating how best to climb up when Denzil — who’d got the rhythm of walking worked out to his satisfaction but hadn’t yet appreciated the myriad complications involved with stopping — walked into him. They both fell out of sight. After a moment, there was the sound of a slow and considered fight.

“Well, none worth speaking of,” Cabal corrected himself. “If I’m not even to be provided with people to try to make something of this mess, then you might as well have these forms back now.”

The Little Old Man cackled.

“How can you say that, Johannes? Don’t you like a challenge? Where’s your sense of adventure?”

“Easily outweighed by my sense of being made a fool of.”

“But you have been provided with people. Sort of. Look around you.”

Cabal looked around him. He was still alone in a grimy dump of a boxcar with only the dubious company of the Little Old Man. “I am looking. All I am seeing, however, are candidates for landfill. What are you getting at?”

The Little Old Man went to the centre of the car and swept his arms around to encompass all that was lying about the place. As a dramatic gesture, it might have been at home in musical comedy. Light musical comedy. “Here are your people, all around you.” He reached into a box and pulled out a bone that Cabal immediately recognised as a human femur. “Here are your riggers” — he dropped it and plucked a ball of hair from a sack — “your barkers” — he put his hand on what Cabal had assumed were rolls of cloth leaning in the corner. “Your concession-stand holders. Your whole carnival is here. Just use a little” — he tapped his temple — “imagination.”

Cabal walked over to inspect a roll. “What do you mean?” He looked closely at the material and belatedly realised what it was. “This,” he said dryly, “is human skin.” There was no reply. He looked around, but the Little Old Man had vanished.

Marvellous, Cabal thought. I don’t even get an instruction book.

He took a small black object from his pocket and squeezed a button on its casing. A wicked-looking blade flicked out. He unrolled some of the “cloth” from the dark roll and cut a long strip from it. Then he got a small ball of hair from the sack, a rag from a barrel, and finally the femur. He carefully tied the hair to the bone, using the piece of cloth. “A rag, a bone, a hank of hair,” he intoned quietly as he wrapped the whole thing in the strip of skin. He regarded the finished object with a scornful shake of the head. “I hate this sort of thing.” He looked for some clear floor. “‘I invoke thee.’” So saying, he lobbed the untidy mess into the clearing.

Down in Hell, a black ball of blood diminished very slightly in size.

The mess came apart long before it reached the floor with more violence than might be regarded as natural. The bone hit the floor first and stopped abruptly, standing neatly vertical. The skin struck it and wrapped tightly about it, so tightly that after a moment it was impossible to tell where its edges were. The bone lurched as more bones budded and flowed from it, but as quickly as the new bone appeared it was submerged in the flowing skin. The small ball of hair landed on top of the growing stack of organic material, teetered, and fell off. It tried repeatedly to regain a perch but seemed doomed to failure. The rag whirled around and around the structure, too fast for Cabal’s eye to follow closely but he got the distinct impression that it was changing colour. The stack of bones was producing a spinal column with a painful clicking pop as each vertebra grew out of the one beneath it. As it completed the thoracic section, ribs sprang out like the opening of a clothless umbrella. The skin flowed upwards like the rising level of a liquid within a glass, almost concealing the bubbling formation of organs within the torso. Arms suddenly burst out as swiftly as the blade of a flick-knife, reminding Cabal to put his away. The circling rag swept in and flew a complex weaving pattern over the surface of the body, and where it flew, clothing appeared. Like ghastly toast, the skull popped up from the neck and grinned maniacally in the way that skulls do. Even when the skin wrapped over it, it continued to grin at Cabal with immodest glee. The skin rolled over the ivory vault of the brainpan like a rising tide over a boulder on the beach, met at the top, and sealed.

Standing before Cabal was a man who hadn’t existed a minute before: slightly shorter than he, black, painfully thin, and dressed in black trousers, white shoes with black spats, a white shirt, and a gleaming waistcoat of black and white vertical stripes. In his hand was a straw boater with a yellow band about it. The man clapped it on his head just in time to prevent the hank of hair settling on his entirely bald skull. A few hairs made a dive for his forehead and knitted quickly into eyebrows, but the rest balanced on top of the boater forlornly for a moment before dropping lifeless to the floor. The man watched it go with dawning dismay, quickly lifting his hat and checking his skull. He was disappointed to find that he was as bald as a cue ball.

“Oh,” he moaned, “oh, man,” and finally, with an air of exasperation, “oh, shit!” He looked down his body, examined his wrists, looked at Cabal as if the roof had just fallen in, and ran around. “A mirror, man! There’s gotta be a mirror around here!” Cabal watched him run. The man found a large grimy piece of silvered glass that may have once been part of a mirror and held it up to his face. He couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing and scrubbed at the surface. It didn’t improve things.

“Look at me,” he wailed. “Look at me. You’ve made me the skinniest guy in the whole world!”

“I did nothing of the sort,” said Cabal testily. Everybody was such a critic. “I summoned you. That’s just the way you turned up. Don’t presume to blame me for any physical shortcomings you might display.”

“But, but…” The man put down the mirror and approached Cabal, emphasising every syllable with his hands. “But you were the one sortin’ out the components, man. Where’s my fat?”

“Fat?” Cabal realised he may have made a small oversight. “Rag, bone, hair. That’s traditionally it. Nobody ever said anything about fat.”

The painfully thin man waved his hands in disbelief. He looked quickly around the car and ran for the corner in long, angular strides. He grasped a crate and pulled it out into the open. Stencilled on the side was a single word: “Lard.”

“Just a little dollop, that’s all, man. That’s all I needed! I could’ve been a fine-lookin’ man, guy. Instead of which, I’m nothin’ but a bag of bones.” He looked beseechingly at Cabal. Cabal looked back at him with a profound lack of sympathy.

“Well, Bones, what do you expect me to do about it? An intravenous drip of melted butter, perhaps?”

“D’ya think that would work?” asked Bones with piteous hope.

“Not for a second. Look, in a little less than a year, all this” — he indicated the immediate environs — “goes, and you, my vain friend, return to the components whence I raised you. So — you must try to understand one simple thing. In one year’s time, there won’t be enough of you left to amuse a dog. Thus, I don’t care what you look like, and neither should you. Our immediate concern should be getting this show on the road. Now, are you going to help, or am I going to have to dispose of you as an unsuccessful experiment and try again?”

Bones put his hands on his hips and allowed himself to slouch into a sassy pose not unlike a crane-fly with attitude. “You am de boss, baaaahss. Dis dumb-ass boy sure am yours to comman’, an’ ain’t dat de trufe?”

“Excellent,” replied Cabal, unperturbed. “Now, come over here.”

“I was bein’ sarcastic,” said Bones in his normal voice — a cadenced tone in a largely American accent with perhaps a hint of French growling through the long vowels — as he walked to where Cabal crouched by the stack of signs.

“You were being tiresome. Look at these.”

“Freaks, derring-do, eighth wonders of the world. Looks pretty standard sideshow stuff to me.”

“So which ones are exciting? Which ones will people come from near and wide to see? I need to know.”

Bones looked at him questioningly. “Why you askin’ me, boss? You the man with the plan, aren’t you?” He looked closely at Cabal. Cabal continued to go through the boards, trying to find the secret. “You have got a plan?”

Cabal stood up and stepped away. He glared at the signs. “I don’t understand. Why would anybody want to waste their time looking at this sort of nonsense? It’s just rubbish! Bogus exhibits, deleterious mutations, lies! None of this is real! None of it’s lasting! They’re just…” He sagged. He hadn’t felt so useless in years. “Dreams. I don’t understand it.”

Bones was having a few problems as well. “But you volunteered for this, didn’tcha? Him downstairs wouldn’t just sock you with this gig unless you knew what you were doing, would he?”

“It’s … a wager.”

“A bet?” If Bones had lived a generation for every one of the five minutes he had so far drawn breath, he still couldn’t have been more surprised. “You got a bet on with the Man himself? You’re crazy! Nobody ever wins against the Man! He’s …” Bones tried to think of a convincing metaphor. He failed. “He’s the MAN, man!”

Behind the dark spectacles, fire returned to Cabal’s eyes. “He’s not going to win this one.”

“You’re kiddin’ yourself!” muttered Bones with evident disdain. “Only folks in stories get the drop on His Satanic Luciferiness. Sorry to be the one to break the news an’ all, but you’re screwed, Jack.”

Cabal ignored him. He was looking at the signs again.

“I have to work to a budget, so I can’t just start everything. I have to make some management decisions about what to go with and what to leave. Some of these sideshows will be useful; others will just waste my resources. I need advice. Mr. Bones, which sideshows shall I invest in?”

Bones shook his head regretfully. “I can’t help you, boss. End of the day, I’m just walkin’ dust. You’re the only real person round here. Your call.”

“I can’t,” replied Cabal conclusively. “I don’t understand people, either. I’ll have to get my advice from somewhere else.” He looked into the distance for a long moment. Then he took a deep breath. “I think I know just the person.” He walked to the exit and jumped down onto the track. Denzil and Dennis were sitting by the train, throwing stones at the crow. None were going even remotely close, but it watched the proceedings with keen interest all the same. “You two,” he spoke sharply. “Obey Mr. Bones’s instructions until I return.”

They looked up as Bones stuck his head out and looked down on them from immediately above. He grinned. “Howdy!” They smiled dozily and waved back.

“Crow! Here!” Cabal ordered. The crow flew to him without hesitation and landed upon his shoulder. “You’re coming with me, so I know you’re not up to mischief.”

“Kronk!” said the crow smugly.

Bones leaned on the doorjamb. “So what do you want me and the corpse boys to be doin’ while you’re gone, chief?”

Cabal pointed towards the engine. “I’m not sure how long I’ll be gone. It might be a few days. In the meantime, clean out the locomotive and get together some fuel. Do you know what it burns?”

“Just about anythin’.”

“Good. Load up the fuel car with wood, and fill the boiler with water. There are lots of ponds and streams around here. That shouldn’t be a problem. Then see if you can get the line clear back to the junction. We’ll need to be under way as soon as the carnival’s put together.”

Bones glanced at the trees and pursed his lips. This didn’t look like a small task. “Is that all? Nothin’ else?” Cabal thought hard. Bones sighed. Him and his big mouth.

“Yes, if you’ve got any time left, I want the name of the carnival painted on the first broad-sided car, both sides. Can you sign-paint?”

“Sure, I can sign-paint, I can do most stuff if I put my mind to it. What do you want to call it, boss?”

Cabal told him.

Bones whistled appreciatively. “Man, you’re just full of surprises.”